Friday, March 4, 2011

Lots of things to do

Well, it's Friday night and I'm making my list for tomorrow. The Fly Fishing Show Expo will be in Valley Forge PA.

I'm pretty excited for it. There's tons of materials I want so I can tie some warm water flies, and I'm running low on tungsten beads and hooks. I'm also most likely going to pick up an automatic bobbin. It's $100, but it looks too damn cool to pass up.

Also, I was actually in Valley Forge today at the KOP Mall and I decided to drive along Valley Creek to check it out. I was amazed by the amount of wild browns I saw when I walked along about 50 yards of water. For a stream that is not stocked at all, it had a very decent amount of fish. I might have to wet a line there early in the morning before the Expo tomorrow.

Coming up next weekend, I'm going to be volunteering to help stock the East Branch Perkiomen Creek. I thought it would be really great to help out the fish and game commission see where the biggest fish are dumped since the stream runs about 150 yards away from my back door. But in all honestly, it should be a pretty cool experience. Opening day in PA is only 4 weeks away.

Then that following Tuesday, I start my first fly tying class. I'm case you cant tell by my shitty fly patterns, I've only been tying for just over a year, and I'm pretty much all self taught. LL Bean is holding classes hosted by George Macaig, who's one of the guys you see tying at the Fly Fishing expos. The classes are free as are the materials, you just need a vise and tools. I think it's like a 30 week class, so I'm hoping to learn a lot.

Fast forward to April 2nd, opening day is here. There's a childrens trout fishing tournament about 15 minutes from here. They dump tons of stockies into this little pond, and there's contest for kids to try and catch the biggest fish. I'm really hoping to get my son into a nice rainbow for his first trout. He turns 2 the next day and my goal is to make sure he lands a fish before that. I'm more excited about this than anything I've mentioned above! Then we're heading home because my wife is apparently organizing the biggest birthday party a two year old has ever seen.

Well, that's about it. I'm going to snipe some people in Halo Reach, finish my beer, and prepare for fly fishing mayhem tomorrow. If anyone of my readers are planning on attending the show, drop me a line here if you'd like to meet up over a beer. Happy Friday.

The Norvise bobbin can be picked up for about a third of the price of the Ekich automatic bobbin, but it uses specialty spools. You have to transfer your thread to these spools to use it. I have about 50 spools of thread, and additional Nor-spools are like $10 each. It would be a nightmare unless I stuck with two or three types of thread. The Ekich bobbin takes all standard spools.